MoCA – Skopje Performance Festival

As part of the project Long-Term Cultural Partnerships for Western Balkans – Europe Dialogue

(Culture.EUBalkans)

Museum of Contemporary Art – Skopje

03-06 October 2024

MoCA – Skopje Performance Festival is an event we aim to organize annually, which will allow for experimentation and sharing of artistic practice of residents and artists from the region, the EU and the international scenes. Through partnerships with cultural institutions as well as organizations, associations, schools, universities, research centres, the festival will engage in wider collaborations and may be extended to other public as well as open spaces.

MoCA – Skopje Performance Festival in 2024 consists of two programs. One derives from the residencies, as well as the pedagogic and research activities conducted through the Art Explora Foundation (France/Albania) partnership and its Villa 31 residency program in Tirana, as well as from collaboration with alumnus from the École nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris-Cergy (ENSAPC) and the artists-collaborators of the Oral History Initiative (OHI) ‒ Prishtina. The other program is a three-day event titled (Post)Yugoslav Legacies and Bodies: Performance, Critique and Utopia curated by Biljana Tanurovska – Kjulavkovski and Slavcho Dimitrov, and consists of screenings, lectures and performances.

The general idea behind the festival is to invent various modi operandi to deal with the transmission of artistic heritage in the enlarged context of the history of modernity, and the amplification of reception of ideas and gestures related to constantly evolving acts and forms searching for emancipation.

This performance festival is the second chapter of the European program Culture.EUBalkans (2022‒2024) whose aim is to encourage the circulation of artists, researchers and cultural actors between the Western Balkans and the European Union, and to promote the dissemination of their practices and their research. The NAM Choreolab performance is presented in collaboration with the PPFestival by Lokomotiva, and the (Non)Aligned Movements project, supported by the Creative Europe/European Cooperation Western Balkans Program and the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of North Macedonia. 

A short review by the curators Biljana Tanurovska-Kjulavkovski and Slavcho Dimitrov on the (Post)Yugoslav Legacies and Bodies: Performance, Critique and Utopia program

 The histories and politics of memory related to the legacies of Yugoslav socialism are a persistent and restless source of debates and disputes. The battles over collective memory symptomatically disclose the ongoing affective charge of Yugoslav legacies. These battles range from the nationalist historical revisionisms dictated by the provincial state-building process in the post-Yugoslav space that phantasmatically reset temporality as starting from a zero point, while being dictated by forces of local and international capital, up to the fetishism of freeze-frame backwards looks towards an idealized past that betrays the present disenchantment and incapacity for imagining different political futures nested in the nostalgic dehistoricization. 

Somewhere between these processes, one can find the multiple and nuanced practices and politics of remembrance that acknowledge both the hurts and failings of history, as much as the “not yet voiced, undischarged element” (Bloch) of the utopian potentiality of the past Yugoslav materials, practices and longings.

It is precisely these cracks, openings, contradictions, ambivalences, potentials and memories that our performative festival programme (Post)Yugoslav Legacies and Bodies: Performance, Critique and Utopiacritically engages with, related to the multiple legacies of Yugoslav political, art and cultural practices and histories. Our program presents artists and scholars whose practices re-assemble, refer to, deconstruct or refract actions or perspectives which are reading historical or political positions, actions or relations of the (post) Yugoslavian context.

Our focus on performance arts derives not only from our commitment to understanding and engaging the problematics of the political and culture as an iterative performative and embodied and affective practice that brings into being collective subjectivities and worlds-in-common, values and orientations, ways of life and shared dispositions, as much as a performative staging of antagonism, disputes and dissensus. Rather, specifically, we would like to tackle the various ideological orientations and apparatuses, key political and collective signifiers and value investments of the Yugoslav legacies, as themselves being historically enacted through multiple art performances, cultural performatives, material-discursive apparatuses, and changing social choreographies. These include practices and affective anchors related to solidarity, anti-fascism, brotherhood and unity, Titoism, non-aligned decolonial politics, women’s and feminist perspectives, collectivism, utopian and emancipatory ideals, supranational Yugoslav identity, (gender) equality, the new socialist man and the working people, self-management, subcultural practices of resistance etc.

Our curatorial perspective is not historical nor genealogical but is creating a space where dialogue between discursive points and artistic practices is performed through certain dilemmas, questions, observations, ideologies, archives or perspectives related to those Yugoslav legacies.

We can point to the mass social choreographies of Sletovi (Flock of Birds) as the most paradigmatic examples of Yugoslav legacies which have both performative and pedagogic functions, overlapping and reinforcing each other. Here, thousands of bodies display, visualize and inscribe the nation, the state symbols, Yugoslav history, the communist party and the Leader (inscribing his signature with their bodies, his name, or other symbols associatively related to his name), resulting in the production of regulated and disciplined bodies.

One should also consider the various choreographies of the working body and labor, embodied in working brigades and the compositions of collective bodies in shared efforts towards (re)building the country, as well as the unruly and resisting bodies of the students’ protests in 1968 or the alternative cultural practices of the 1980s, most saliently, the punk cultural formations and their artistic offshoots. Building up new infrastructures, platforms, sensibility, theories, magazines, fanzines, and aesthetics, punk introduced a world within the world, precisely through its political impropriety, that is to say, by meshing, reconfiguring, redistributing, and playing with and within the existing horizon of the sensible, on the one hand, and doing politics at its allegedly improper site, which is to say mass culture, culture, and arts.

In this bundle of historical performatives, of special interest for us are the rich, contextually and historically specific, and conceptually diverse performance art practices in ex-Yugoslavia of individual artists, and the self-organized and collective structures of production and organization of art. To mention a few, one cannot overlook the importance of art groups such as Zenith, Gorgona, Mediala, OHO, Bosch+Bosch, KÔD, The Group of Six Artists, as well as the performances and programs presented and produced within the infrastructures of the various Student and Youth Cultural Centers in Ljubljana, Belgrade, Zagreb, Skopje, and many other. 

Even more importantly, our joint effort to support, curate and enhance the creation of performative practices is grounded also in the conviction that the backward glance towards the past and the contradictory legacies of Yugoslavia – especially those related to the reflection and critique of capitalism, solidarity, utopia, emancipation, collectivism, gender equality, the struggle against class exploitation and inequality, supranational identity – can help us enact a critique (not only of the past but) of the prison house of the present, and stage desires and visions of futurity charged with indeterminate and open potentiality beyond the devastating logic of the world of capitalist realism, nationalism, sexism, homophobia, and colonialism. Beyond the epistemic, cultural and political auto-colonisation that has deemed us all as political infants, we would like to explore the potentials of the “no-longer-conscious” as a methodology of critical hermeneutics and reparative reading that mobilizes the performative force of the unfinished past, serving the utopian “not-yet-here” and reflecting the affective dynamics and necessities of hope (as argued by Bloch and Muñoz). In the spirit of Mark Fisher, we would like to awaken the specters of lost futures, the ghosts of failed promises and unfinished utopias as anticipatory illuminations of other possible worlds. 

Finally, the selection and presentation of contemporary performance art practices is determined by our appreciation of the “utopian performative” force (Dolan) of these performances, bringing forward different temporalities, space-times, and making them affectively sensed, while critically mobilizing part of the legacies of Yugoslav emancipatory ideals, or addressing the post-Yugoslav turbo-fascism (Papić), that is the entrenched in the patriarchal politics (which persisted within everyday socialist life despite the proclaimed egalitarianism), homophobia, and violent practices towards cultural and religious others.

PROGRAM
PDF

3rd of October 2024 (Thursday)/partner program  

18:30
Presentation of the partners from the Culture.EUBalkans initiative and discussion: Jeta Rexha, Director of the Oral History Initiative–OHI, Prishtina; Joséphine Dauphin, in charge of the residency programmes at Art Explora, Paris/Tirana; Camille Kingué, Head of International Affairs and Career Development at École nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris-Cergy (ENSAPC), Paris. Moderation: Ivana Vaseva, curator at MoCA – Skopje.

20:00
Performance A Hacker’s Guide to the Forest: Museum Edition by Collective Tree.0 (Elisabeth Banom, Kathryn Marshall, Martijn Van Elferen), alumni of École nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris-Cergy (ENSAPC).

21:00
Screening of three video artworks: Trans’nistria (11’ 50’’) and Abkhazia After (13’ 44’’) by Vangjush Vellahu, The Goldfinch (4’ 25’’) and How Stars Are Born? (4’ 03’’) by Olson Lamaj and Bitches on Their Deen (50’) by Anna Ehrenstein, residents of Villa 31, residency programme in Tirana run by the Art Explora Foundation (France/Albania).

04-06.10.2024 /main program

(Post)Yugoslav Legacies and Bodies: Performance, Critique and Utopia

Curated event
Curators: Biljana Tanurovska – Kjulavkovski and Slavcho Dimitrov

4^th October, 2024 (Friday)

18.30 – 19:15
Hristina Ivanoska/ Document Missing: On Methodology (text, voice, and body) (2014-) /performance, 40 min.

19:30-20:30
Jovana Karaulić/ Staging the State: Cultural Performances of Yugoslavism/ lecture

20:45  
Marta Popivoda, in collaboration with Ana Vujanović/ SURFACES THAT MATTER: Youth Day 1988 (2022)/ video installation, 20 min.,  loop
Marta Popivoda/ YUGOSLAVIA, HOW IDEOLOGY MOVED OUR COLLECTIVE BODY (2013) / Serbia, France Germany, film, 62 min.

5^th October, 2024, (Saturday)  

19:00 – 20:00
Klelija Zhivkovikj/ Who Taught You How to Feel Good? (2024)/ performance, 20 min.
Milica Rakić and Vladimir Bjeličić/ Investigative Procedure: The File of a Yugoslav Woman (2024)/ performance, 15-20 min.
Olja Grubić/ IKEBANA (2018)/ performance, 25 min.

20:30 – 21.30
Dražen Dragojević/ Such as Partisans with Non /a performance lecture

6^th October, 2024 (Sunday) 

18:00 – 19:00
Jasmina Založnik/ Claiming of Space. New Performative Art Practices in Yugoslavia/ lecture

19:30
NAM ChoreoLab: Sonja Pregrad, Ana Dubljević, Viktorija Ilioska, Dražen Dragojević/ SUCH AS RHYMES WITH NON Non does not repeat. But it does rhyme. (2024) / performance